During my years as a drinker, I was around many people who were slaves to liquor. I don’t really know how many of them thought of themselves as having a problem. But I do know that a lot of people emphasize the fun they’re having when drinking and their desire to drink.
Heavy drinkers find millions of ways to joke about their drink, to half-heartedly mock themselves, etc. But the truth it, they are powerfully driven to drink, and that’s a hard thing to admit.
Well, if you’ve ever … [Read more...]

I don’t have any children. Instead, I have a story. I had a friend once, who I no longer keep in touch with, who probably will never see this.
We’ll call her Erica. She had two children, one who lived with her (the child’s) father, and one who lived with Erica.
Erica’s daughter, I’ll call Bailey, and while I knew the two of them, she went from about five years old to seven or eight. She was kind of tall, with a long torso and faint freckles under her eyes. I’d hang out sometimes, … [Read more...]

I had to be away from the blog for a period of time, and while I was, I saw something I really wanted to respond to.
The libertarian news site Vice ran an interview with the neuroscientist Marc Lewis, who went through rehab for alcoholism himself and applied his experiences to his science know-how (or vice versa).
Lewis’s argument is twofold: that rehab is one big scam and that it’s also dangerous to treat alcoholism as a disease. So, I’d like to address each of these in … [Read more...]